I think the recovery numbers are wrong (along with deaths and cases). It depends on what country your talking about as to why they are wrong though.
China flat out lied on everything and their numbers are usless.
Iran? Iran from the start was lying about their recoveries. They had their inital case numbers recovered in less than a week and crap like that went on for a good chunk of march. They were account for more than half of the non china recoveries daily for the world. Total BS.
The USA recovery number whent up really slow. Sitting on the same number for a week at a time. Were they being careful or was the paperwork sitting in someones inbox for days at a time. Is there still some sort of slowness going on?
Germany. Last seven days 57,400 / 60,300 / 64,300 / 68,200 / 72,600 / 77,000 / 83,114. You can see the problem there.
Those are the easy one right off the top of my head. You can pick apart a number of other counties numbers the same way.
Problem with the recovery numbers is theres no real standard between countries on what or when a recovery is counted, people lying to make their country look better, some might be lying to scare their population, and some might be slipping through the cracks or sitting on a desk somewhere waiting for a signature. God knows what else can be wrong with them and the case and death number have similar problems.
As for whats happening? What it looks like to me is countries whos government doesnt step on its dick with its response and have a halfway decent medical system that doesnt get overwhelmed isnt having a big problem. It does seem, like you say, that large stacked cities with more mass transit have a much worse problem.
This is based on what I've seen around here, but it probably applies in a lot of places in the U.S.
1. This shit sticks around a long time. Even if you start feeling better, you may still test positive and therefore won't be considered recovered. Around here we had to open centers for people who are well enough to be released from the hospital, but still test positive and can't go home to their families yet.
2. Not a lot of follow up with non-hospitalized cases. If you test positive and go home and recover it's not like they give you a call and are like "did you get better? Did you die?". People at my work who tested positive and are now feeling better want to return to work, but they need to get proof they're clear and they've been having a hard time getting access to the two tests they need to be considered recovered, which goes into the next point--
3. Lack of testing capacity. It's gotten a lot better, but there are still a lot of people who need tests. It's hard to cover all the people who need tests, whether they're people who suspect they have it because they have symptoms, people who live with people who have it and want to know if they have it too, presumptive positive cases who died they want to test and then the people who need tests because they've already tested positive and now feel better and want to know if they still have it.
My state never lists recovered cases in the official counts, I have no idea if they're reporting anywhere so they can be counted in the statistics Johns Hopkins, etc have. Last I heard they were like "yeah, it will be awhile before we're able to get a handle on those numbers"
The lines for the testing centers here are insane, and the hospitals are packed. There's so much on everyone's plate, I can easily see how it would be hard to get a real accurate count of all the cases and their statuses.
There are definitely way more recovered than are listed. I have no doubt numbers get fudged in different ways too, plus the usual bureaucracy and ineptitude you might expect, but a lot of it just comes down to not being able to get good counts because of the chaos.
